ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on so-called ‘accidental criminals’ – embezzling clerks and postmen, agricultural labourers driven to crime by poverty, and the many convicts sentenced for an offence committed while drunk – who were thought to be at risk of contamination. It also considers ‘gentleman convicts’ who published articles and memoirs upon release and gave evidence to the Kimberley Commission. The latter were middle- and upper-middle-class men, mainly sentenced for fraud or embezzlement, offences that were often far from ‘accidental’. They saw themselves as immune to criminal pedagogy but were sensitive to ‘filthy’ language, which included the discussion of sex between men. Some of the Kimberley Commission’s witnesses – prison officials and ex-convicts – proposed segregating ‘educated’ prisoners from others and/or varying their treatment, proposals that the commission ultimately rejected. It was concerned with an apparent disparity in the effect of penal servitude upon different prisoners but sensitive to charges of class-based favouritism. Men sentenced for ‘unnatural’ offences were excluded from the division it proposed. Aside from ‘filthy talk’ and the potential for sexual activity, the mere presence of such convicts was itself seen as a source of contamination.
